Does Your WAN Get You Down? Try Citrix NetScaler!

I’m operating once again under the premise that this is an Election Year and don’t do Paid Political Announcements but ran into another scenario where I was introduced to a new resource at an old friend (Citrix) who gave me something worth sharing with my followers. As someone who spent over 30 years in the Telecom/Datacom side of the house, I must admit that this old dog learned a new trick when it comes to clients that are running multiple types of networks such as MPLS, Internet/DSL/Cable and even 4G LTE or Satellite connections (quite popular when having to connect internationally) to reach all of their different sites across their respective networks. I think that most of us know Citrix in terms of how they have helped introduce Virtualization across Desktops, Servers, Applications and of course any Mobile Device that we all carry, but I would be willing to bet that most people are not aware of how they can now Virtualize your WAN Network to offer similar efficiencies in your network and that can apply whether or not you are actually already using Citrix inside of your infrastructure or not!

This is not exactly a new technology but what Citrix has done is migrate an acquisition from a short time ago called CloudBridge, which offered Software Defined Networking and merged it into their NetScaler offering to help optimize the amount of bandwidth needed into a single logical network versus the different connections that you might have in place today. This is becoming even more important as we starting layering large amounts of VoIP or Skype traffic on these networks (we have all had a bad experience or two using VoIP, let’s be honest out there) and by utilizing NetScaler, you are able to Virtualize your WAN and here’s the cool part, you can reduce your MPLS Network costs by up to 75% with minimal change to your existing network! I must admit that this has a bit of “WOW” factor for someone like me who worked in the networking business for a long time and certainly thought that this was worth sharing with you all.

I’m including some additional bullet points below on NetScaler/SD-WAN with a graphic supplied by Citrix plus a link to a video at the bottom of the page which is also a brief description on NetScaler (fka CloudBridge) so feel free to drop me a line at Glen.Benjamin@direclogix.com if you or your company are interested in learning more. Thanks!

Citrix NetScaler/SD-WAN Graphic

Use cases:

Optimize application performance and reliability

Users in the enterprise complaining about application performance, responsiveness, or network outages